Boston Celtics: the C’s 5 greatest villains from the 2010s

The villain who was a villain from within: Kyrie Irving

Do you know who Marissa Mayer is? She was the CEO of “Yahoo!” from 2012–2017. Before she was CEO of the company, she was a top executive at their main competitor, Google, where she played a major part in Google’s search engine, Google Maps, and Google News.

Yahoo! brought her in as CEO in order to lead a turnaround and make the company more competitive with Google. Unfortunately, that didn’t go to plan as her tenure as CEO was considered unsuccessful. During her stint as CEO, Mayer was criticized for her micromanaging style, requiring remote employees to start working in the office (this one seems wild given how the world is now), and an overall unsuccessful performance that led to layoffs and revenue loses.

The reason I spent an entire paragraph writing about Marissa Mayer is to give an example of a villain who you don’t think is a villain because you think they’re on your side. However, their actions end up causing more bad than good for you which happened in Yahoo’s case.

This mirrors Kyrie Irving’s two-year stint with the Boston Celtics.

Like Mayer, Irving came from a top competitor in the Cleveland Cavaliers, who had just beaten the Cs in the 2017 Eastern Conference Finals, to hopefully lead the organization to success. In 2018, his first year with the team, things looked hopeful until he suffered a season-ending knee injury.

Expectations heading into 2018-19 were extremely high, and because you’re reading a blog about the Celtics, it’s safe to assume that you know they weren’t met.

Boston struggled all year, and Kyrie consistently called out his teammates. In his postgame press conferences, he went after the championship pedigree of the young players on the team and questioned coaching.

The season ended with the Celtics losing in the second round of the playoffs to the Milwaukee Bucks where Irving was especially awful. The 2019 season was just a nightmare, and their “face of the franchise” was definitely a big part of that.

Dealing with this kind of a villain is especially irritating because you think they’re on your side, but really they’re just making things worse.